THE NEW YORKER Faculty." At one end of the shelf were a couple of volumes by Dr. A. Law- rence Lowell and a little farther over Was a book by Professor Felix Frank- furter. In between was a seven-volume, beautifully bound edition of the works of Geoffrey Chaucer.. Sllipbreaking AN official of one of the large lines f'l. has been telling us about the sale of some of the big outdated ocean lin- ers to shipbreakers (that's the name for companies that take old ships apart with hammers and acetylene torches). It seems that a liner no longer fit for service is sold practically intact to the shipbreaker, all that's taken out, as a rule, being the ship's three chrono- meters and sometimes the tableware and linen-even though they're always marked with the ship's name. Engines, bridge equipment, and deck machinery are always ruthlessly scrapped, al- though sometimes they are in prime condition. There's nothing else to do with them. Mere deterioration is almost never a cause for scrapping a vessel. The thing is that people want to ride on the newest, fastest, and most fashionable ships, and the old-timers lose caste. It cost approximately $10,000 a day to operate the Leviathan at sea, and to make any money she had to have at least four capacity round trips out of the thirteen annually required by the mail con tracts. During her last sea- son, the Leviathan carried as few as seventy-five passengers a trip, which didn't pay. The new Manhattan, on the other hand, is a consistent money- maker. When the Normandie and Queen Mary are put in service, it will undoubtedly jolt several of the older liners into limbo. The economic life of a big liner is usually ahout twenty years, but it varies. The Minnewaska and the Minnetonka, sold six months ago to shipbreakers, were eleven and ten years old, respec- tively. The Mauretania, however, last- ed twenty-seven years, and she made her record crossing of four days, seven- teen hours, and forty-nine minutes when she was twenty-two. She fetched about f80,000 from the shipbreakers; the Minnewaska and the Minnetonka were sold for about f45,000 each. The figures represent about five per cent of the original cost. The price of an old liner depends on her tonnage, the mar- ket for scrap steel, and the salability of her furnishings. In many of the older ships, the furniture was clamped to the floor and especially built for marine service, and is hard to dispose of. The scrappers sell it for what they can get, and ship furniture may turn up in third- rate boarding houses or almost any- where else. Part of the furniture of the French liner France, also recently sold, went to equip an old seadogs' home in Le Havre. Disposing of salon dec- orations is an even greater problem, since such objects are usually outsize. Nobody seems to know what's to hecome of the Mauretania's famous dining-salon panels. Very (Jfte n such items are simply destroyed for lack of a huyer. Britain, Japan, and Italy are the three largest shipbreaking nations, with Tokio and the Firth of Forth being the great centres. Old ships are usu- ally destroyed without ceremony among Occiden tals, but an exception to this was the White Star liner Corin thic, called the luckiest ship ever afloat. She ran twenty-nine years without a single Inishap, and when she Inade her fare- well appearance on the Thalnes, Lon- don schoolchildren caIne out wavIng ' I '\'"' J ) ( (( r J)) ( l ;j'-' \0 q y tt (C , 17 Union Jacks and sang a valedictory. They were sent home with baskets of butter and cheese from the ship's larder. The Japanese shipbreakers don cere- monial robes once a year and perform rites for the souls of departed ships. The domestic shiphreaking business is small, the most important unit being the Union Steel Company of Baltimore, where the cadaverous Morro Castle now ,reposes. Once in awhile Henry Ford buys and scraps a ship-for the steel and the fun of it. C'fave Man T HE mother of a young man named Herbert has no doubt whatever that what women really want from the male is the so-called brutal treatment- not after what happened last Tuesday, when she went to Herbert's kindergar- ten to take him home. Herbert is a shy, gentle, kind boy, but she found him in the cloakroom dragging a little girl around by the hair. AlJ she could do was scream "Herbert!" "She asked me to do it," said H erhert mildly. "She j " k "" l {'J It. ;' ..-